Ontario Scrapped Its Nominee Program in 2026 — What Happened to Human Capital Priorities
The short version is that Ontario scrapped its nominee program in 2026. On 30 May, Regulation 47/26 legally revoked all nine of the province’s existing nominee streams — which is what happened to Ontario Human Capital Priorities stream, the immigrant nominee program candidates used to count on. 26 June 2026: a single replacement launched. If you’ve been planning around Human Capital Priorities — the stream that used to search the Express Entry pool and issue Notifications of Interest without you applying anywhere — that plan needs a rewrite.
How Human Capital Priorities used to work
Before the revocation, Human Capital Priorities was one of Ontario’s Express Entry-linked streams, operating on a model called notification-of-interest: Ontario searched the federal Express Entry pool for candidates who matched its criteria and issued a Notification of Interest directly, rather than the candidate applying in first. It sat alongside eight other streams — Employer Job Offer in three variants, Masters Graduate, PhD Graduate, French-Speaking Skilled Worker, Skilled Trades and Entrepreneur — that together made up the old Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program.
Nine OINP streams revoked, what comes next
On 30 May 2026, Ontario Regulation 47/26 revoked all nine of those streams at once. Ontario’s own updates page confirms it directly: “The new Ontario Workforce Priority stream has now launched, and all other streams are now closed.” There is no ambiguity here and no partial survival — Human Capital Priorities, along with the other eight, is gone.
What replaced it
The Ontario Workforce Priority stream launched on 26 June 2026, following criteria published on ontario.ca on 20 July 2026. It works differently from Human Capital Priorities in a fundamental way: it’s employer-initiated, meaning an employer starts the nomination process rather than a province searching the pool on your behalf. Ontario scores candidates against 11 published factors — work region, NOC TEER category, hourly wage, Ontario work experience, income tax history, language proficiency — with maxima that sum to 130 points.
As at the most recent published invitations page, the newest round on record was 30 April 2026, and every round listed there still belongs to the old, now-closed streams. The Workforce Priority stream had not appeared on the invitations page at all, and its Expression of Interest system remained closed, with Ontario saying only that it’s “anticipated to open later in the summer” and giving no firm date.
Why the search-the-pool model went away
Ontario itself hasn’t published a detailed rationale beyond the regulation and the replacement stream. What’s clear from the mechanics is a shift in philosophy: away from a province going and finding candidates already sitting in the federal pool, toward employers driving nominations for people they’ve specifically identified as wanting to hire. That mechanism — notification of interest into Ontario — is gone, not paused pending a future relaunch. If you were counting on Ontario noticing your Express Entry profile the way Human Capital Priorities used to, that route no longer exists in any form.
What to do with the old advice
Nothing published online describing Human Capital Priorities as active, or listing its old criteria, reflects current reality — a lot of that content is still circulating because the pages describing former streams haven’t necessarily been pulled everywhere they were copied. If a guide or a forum post talks about applying to Human Capital Priorities in 2026, it’s describing something that no longer exists. The live question now is whether an employer is willing to nominate you through Workforce Priority, since Ontario has published no criteria that let you self-nominate the way the old streams allowed. Other provinces still run their own search-the-pool or expression-of-interest mechanisms; check each one’s current rules directly rather than assuming Ontario’s old model persists elsewhere in the same shape.
Check ontario.ca directly before making any plan that depends on Ontario’s PNP — this is a fast-moving file, and even facts current in mid-2026 may have shifted again by the time you read this.
Our Provincial Nominee Programs guide covers how the province-by-province route works generally — worth reading alongside the current, published rules for whichever province you’re actually targeting.